Two. 
About J.R.

Keeping body and soul together while remaining in the theatre became one of my favorite
investigations.

To talk about my life and self is one way of presenting my creden-
tials, as it were, and of giving some consideration to what sort of
person is saying what I have to say. I find, after all, that it is rather fun
to think about myself autobiographically. My life has not been that of
the solo artist, whose work may speak for itself, but one of constant col-
laboration with artists, producers, directors, technicians and tools. To
think about lighting design or a lighting designer at all is to include a
great many other people and a great many other things.
 For most of my life, profession and person have not really been sep-
arable. At twenty-three I "opened on Broadway" stage managing
Leslie Howard's Hamlet -- a fortuitous opportunity requiring the ut-
most temerity in the face of chance. More than a quarter of a century
later I designed the lighting for Richard Burton's Hamlet on Broadway,
having, so to speak, worked my way back up to my beginnings.
professionally and personally I should like to think that I have
matured steadily if erratically through my more than half a century.
Nonetheless, looking back, I would say that my childhood and the
decade of the 1920s and the early 1930s were the years that had the
greatest influence on the whole of my life.

 My mother, a prejudiced observer if ever there was one, admits that
when I was born in New York City on March 16, 1912, 1 was about
as hideous and fragile a specimen as could hope for survival. My birth
weight was less than five pounds and for weeks I gained not an ounce.
Both my parents were physicians. In despair they took me to a special-
ist at Mt. Sinai Hospital and demanded what to do with the scrawny,
shrunken little thing. On the prescribed Walker-Gordon milk, with an
additive, I finally began, I am told, to resemble a human baby rather
than a starving animal.
 Dr. Pauline Rosenthal, my mother, went back to her practice. The
money was needed to support my older brother and me. Cared for
by our "one in help," a fat Hungarian cook, I was fed sour cream and
bananas, a diet frowned upon at the time when the latest medical
practice limited babies to milk for the first year. Her primitive disre-

Jeannie had the largest, most speaking
blue eyes, and they followed me with
reproach whenever I left her alone.

-- Dr. Pauline Rosenthal

gard for such a fad may have contributed to the blessing of unusual
good health with which I was to be endowed for the rest of my life.

 By the time I was six my devoted parents were stuffing me with oat-
meal in the mornings. I invariably threw up this hideous substance
before I reached the Ethical Culture School in the Bronx from Rich-
mond Hill on Long Island where we then lived. Mine was a family
of strong-willed individuals and I suppose, being selfish, I learned then
that I could gain my way more easily by being polite and permissive
toward others rather than by openly fighting for it. It was a pragmatic
approach.
 We moved to Jamaica, Long Island. In the evenings our house there
was full of friends from Forest Hills and Kew Gardens, most of them
younger than my parents. Among others, Dick Rodgers of Rodgers and
Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose father had been a neighbor
of ours in Harlem, came with Herb Fields to strum on our rickety piano,
constructing tunes with one finger. I remember loving the house, the
apple orchard across the Union Turnpike, the Black Stump Road of
old, old houses and long hills for winter coasting, but, on the whole,
resenting the visitors. I do not remember much about the Ethical Cul-
ture School, which I continued to attend, except that at its summer
camp I had a chance to ride horses.
 My mother believed in the most progressive possible education.
When she met William Fincke, she found the educator she sought for
her children. Headmaster Fincke was a gentle, tortured man who had
served as a chaplain in World War I and afterwards found that he could
not in Christian conscience mount another pulpit. His dream of the
future, of world peace, was based on children, all children, of every
color, creed and level of society, and he founded an academy in which
to teach them. Ivan, Jean and Leon Rosenthal were matriculated
in Bill Fincke's Manumit School in Pawling, New York. My nickname
there was "Sparky" because my pet toy was a wooden horse named
Sparkplug from the funny papers.
 We scholars chose our own projects and learned what we pleased
to under the permissive supervision of a New England poetess, Sarah
Cleghorn, and other faculty members distinguished less for pedagogy
than for ideals. I was even taught to drive a car by trial and error,
without a word of comment or interference. At Manumit the most
important thing I learned was how to walk into a chicken house with-
out disturbing the chickens.
 One of our class projects was the Shaw play Arms and the Man, for
which I was stage manager and director, using my prerogatives to cast
Ivan in the lead. I never did want to act, but I did love props, scenery
and lights.

 By the time William Fincke died and Manumit lost its character,
the Rosenthals had moved into two floors of an old brownstone on

I have spent many sleepless nights over
the cruelties we parents practice upon
our children, knowing no better. Jean
wasted no time protesting, a character
trait she developed to an art. She had
her own way of dealing with the in-
evitable. To satisfy an autocratic parent
she swallowed her oatmeal without com-
plaint. Later, she quietly disposed of it.
-- Dr. Pauline Rosenthal

               Manumit School
                Pawling, N.Y.
                March 4, 1926

Dear Old Things,
   I  dropped French lessons because
 did not feel it was doing me much
good, however if you are anioux [sic]
for me to learn it I will take it up again
if possible. Please write and tell me your
disision [sic].
               Lots of love,
               Sparky
P.S. Could you send me some money.

East Fifteenth Street in Manhattan. Friends' Seminary was just around
the corner and we children were enrolled at suitable age levels in spite
of our lack of preparation. I managed to get on through the twelfth
grade there without distinction except for an athletic trophy or two,
in which sports I have forgotten. I think I applied to Swarthmore and
other places, but my education had been much too unconventional
for college acceptance. What I remember best is that those were stim-
ulating years, although hectic and full of uncertainty, and that the peo-
ple who were part of them, the people with whom I was in contact,
were extraordinary.
 I was not raised in a small town but in a vibrant and stimulating
city, full of change, full of activity. My parents were fully aware of
the importance of taking advantage of such an environment. As a child
I saw every play that opened; the opera and symphony were part of
my weekly routine. There were the columnists I read, like Heywood
Broun and F.P.A.; the dramatic critics, Brooks Atkinson, Percy Ham-
mend, John Mason Brown. The League of Composers was introducing
Stravinsky and his colleagues to this country; the Ballets Russes and
Pavlova were electrifying audiences. There was the opening of the
Museum of Modern Art and the introduction of the great Impression-
ists. All these were part and parcel of my early days. And the schools
I attended reflected the kind of curiosity and imagination my parents
wished to instill in their children.

 Since colleges would not have me I was sent instead to the Neigh-
borhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, simply to enlarge my hori-
zons. I had shown no predilection for dancing or acting, but since I
did not know what I wanted to do it seemed to my parents a good
idea -- part of a general, overall background. There I met the people
who have had the most lasting and dominant influence on my life and
way of thinking: Louis Horst, Martha Graham, Laura Elliott, Irene Lew-
isohn -- and of these Martha Graham was certainly the most important.
She was a woman of imagination, of total purpose toward what she
wished to achieve, and she was busy creating a new language in the
dance. I was fortunate enough to grow up with her as it developed.
My association with her was really the first I had in terms of lighting
design, and it still continues.
 I consider myself the luckiest person alive in the theatre. Somehow
or other the time and my presence managed to coincide on projects of
unbelievable magnitude and interest. After all, what luck to begin with
the young Martha Graham!

 The Neighborhood Playhouse had been founded in the early twen-
ties by Irene Lewisohn and her sister Alice. They had built it into a
distinguished small producing unit. Its most notable productions had
been The Dybbuk and The Little Clay Cart, instantaneous hits with
people coming all the way down to Grand Street to see them, my
family and me among the crowds.

Manhattan's a wondrous toy,
lust made for a girl and boy.
We'll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy!
            -- Rodgers and Hart

When she came to me at the Neighbor-
hood Playhouse, Jean was a little, pop-
eyed girl, enamoured of the theatre, and
she did not know what she wanted to
do. Or maybe she did. She wanted to
"make theatre."
- Martha Graham

 Aline Bernstein was the designer. The performers were gifted. Many
good solid actors of the 1930s, members of the Theatre Guild com-
panies and successful career actors like Paula Trueman, Dorothy Sands
and Albert Carroll, came from there. The Playhouse achieved its early
reputation for distinction based on the selection of material performed,
the extraordinary designing of Aline Bernstein and the very persuasive
directing of the Lewisohn sisters.
 I enrolled as a student in 1929, just when the Neighborhood Play-
house moved uptown from the old Henry Street Playhouse to become
a school devoted to dramatic education. The curriculum included
styles of dance, taught by Louis Horst. I loved this. Louis was a large,
shock-haired man, a brilliant musical theorist and an extraordinary
teacher, with an acid wit. We all knew, or thought we did, that he was
Martha's lover, although we never could figure when she had time to
be his mistress. Martha, who taught us to dance, seemed to live most
of her life in a change room, with a catchall closet and a hot plate on
which she perpetually prepared tea to go with scraps of food. Her
intense sensuality and her equally intense spirituality were spent to
exhaustion in her dancing. That she had the stark beauty of saint-and-
sinner combined in one woman we envied, and we understood why
she captivated Louis.
 Voice production and speech were taught by Laura Elliott in so
inspiring and practical a fashion that none of her students ever after
had trouble being clearly heard.
 Lyric theatre production was theoretically under the pedagogical
direction of Irene Lewisohn. We students, however, were certain that
it was her sister Alice who was important, although between the two
of them no one was ever quite sure who did what. When we were
working Irene gave us very little. She produced one show a year up-
town, and that on the grand scale. There were lyric dramas, such as
The White Peacock, Blocks and Israel, with orchestra, mime and dance.
The members of the Neighborhood Playhouse dominated the casts,
joined by people from outside. I remember one production in which
we were supported, in the very lowest ranks of a procession, by the
entire university group, which included Henry Fonda, Charles Leather-
bee and Myron McCormack. That is an example of the sort of thing
that went on and the kind of people involved in such activity.
 At our regular classes we students did learn a great deal because our
instruction came from such stimulating people. Not what they taught
hut how they talked about what they taught was pretty compelling.
 My receptivity to Playhouse training was limited because I hated per-
forming and I hated dancing. I suspect my subconscious mind of taking
the aggressive step which prevented me from dancing when I fell down
a flight of stairs and hurt my back. Happily I retired to the sidelines
and then moved backstage as technical assistant to Martha Graham,
whose personality and purpose fascinated me.

 When 1 left the Neighborhood Playhouse after a year and a half I had

"[Martha Graham's] state of being a
woman, virgin-lover-mother-lady-temp-
tress-wanton all at the same time ..."
-- Leroy Leatherman

begun to know that I had a useful way of seeing things. I saw them in
terms of photographic images. It was natural to me to project how a
place or a movement or an event should look in my mind's eye.
 I have no idea what guided me to Yale. It seems to me that at the
time I had never heard of the place. However, I am quite sure my
mother knew of the George Pierce Baker Workshop there and in any
event I did arrive in New Haven and was interviewed by Mr. Baker.
After five minutes, for some reason he decided to take me on in spite
of the fact that I had had almost no education at all. For three years
was to work diligently there with quite marvelous people.
 George Baker impressed me and I loved his course in the history of
the theatre. I gathered from the reactions of the other students that I
was the only one who did not already know his stories, but to me they
were enchanting. He lectured on the history of the stage as if he had
been in each place and had discussed everything with the playwrights.
When he reached the late nineteenth century, he actually had known
them. The "I was there" quality you notice in most people who are
totally immersed in their subject always delights me, as I was to be de-
lighted later by the way John Gielgud observes the plays of Shakespeare,
as if he had discussed them with the playwright.
 To teach scene design there was Donald Oenslager, at his organized
best, a man who regards all design work in the theatre as an analysis of
style. I still find it curious that an artist whose own work does not in-
spire me either with its nobility or with its exact rightness for a produc-
tion should have such an inspiring approach to design. As a teacher he
is simply perfect. His system of teaching combines the history of design
in each period with the essential social history of the period. When one
approached a play after learning from him, one had a technique of ap-
proach that encompassed investigating the society of its period, the
decorative, musical and artistic aspects of that time. Then one applied
oneself to the problem of designing for it. I have used this approach
ever since. It has been my pleasure, through my professional years, to
meet Donald Oenslager now and then and to find that he has managed
to remain the same man. We have never worked together, except once,
briefly, on a New York production of Dear Liar with Katharine Cornell.
As a designer he prefers to have his lighting done under his direct con-
trol, which is perfectly valid.
 Frank Bevin, a brilliant designer who rarely ventured out of New
Haven, taught us costume design. He also investigated with pleasur-
able thoroughness the historic and decorative background of each
period.
 In fact, what was happening at Yale then was a teaching of techniques
that involved immersion in the whole environment: no play or dance,
no music or form was studied or presented in a social vacuum. The men
teaching us were, with the exception of Baker, young men active in the
theatre outside the university as well as within it. Baker, the older man,
really represented the transition from Pinero and Clyde Fitch to the
more truly naturalistic theatre.

Each period demands in part its own
technique.

-- George Pierce Baker

New Haven, 1933
Mother I am getting to be a public
character get out the old scrappe book
because there are going to be plenty of
clippings all about our daughter doing
her bit ... it certainly is swell experi-
ence of a kind, although I hope to god
I never have to do it again. I am of
course devoted to the group I am work-
ing with, I praise them to high heaven
to their faces without even blushing, I
love 'em they've been so good and
learned all their lines and come to re-
hearsals and when the author and I had
a fight or rather an argument over a
scene that was cut, they horsed it de-
lightfully just to prove my point, so the
scene is out, and I loved them for it,
aside from that the author and I man-
age pretty well, we were good friends
when he was at school
Your loving Jeannie


  While I was at Yale the Pinero theatre was moved on -- partly by my
 instructors into the Philip Barry theatre and all that that implies, into
 the O'Neill theatre and all that that implies, and before I left there in
 1933, the Depression with its economic problems and problerns of com-
 munication had pushed theatre into another new style. This was in
 effect the Brechtian theatre, of which Orson Welles was a part and so
 were those meagre, terse, dry wells of inspiration which resulted in the
 documentary theatre. With all this maturing at the time, I really could
 not have been better placed in history. I waltzed through an entire span
 of dramatic changes in a period of about three years.

  Stanley McCandless, the grandfather of us all, was the person with
 whom I was most involved at Yale. He taught lighting. A man in his
 middle thirties at the time, he had been a student of architecture who
 had switched to electrical engineering and at Harvard had become in-
 terested in the 47 Workshop with George Pierce Baker. When Baker set
 up Yale's drama department he invited Mac to come along as professor
 of lighting. This taciturn Scotsman was quite incapable of expressing his
 very orderly ideas, although he wrote probably the best book on light-
 ing fundamentals. With his characteristic humility he did not call it
 "The Method for Lighting the Stage" but "A Method for Lighting the
 Stage." I think I loved Mac for that title as much as anything else.
  Mac was simply enamored of light. Although he could not communi-
 cate about it, somehow or other I learned a lot. Because I knew so little
 and he knew so much and because I was so interested in lighting by
 then, simply listened to every word he said. If I never did learn any-
 thing really practical from him, I did learn an orderliness, a way of
 thinking about lighting, and certainly a way of organizing it. I have
 come to know since that if you can organize your ideas in the theatre,
 you have half chance of putting them over.
 Besides being incommunicado, the stumbling block for McCandless
was that much as he loved light he did not know how to apply it dra-
matically. I had an instinct for this and could visualize in such a way
that his teaching supplemented this instinctive knowledge and pro-
vided the basis for techniques needed in order to articulate my im-
ages. Perhaps that is why we got on so well together. Our relationship,
a warm and good one, lasted through many trying circumstances to the
time of his death several years ago.
 I have always felt that insofar as this country is concerned McCandless
was indeed the granddaddy of us all. Not because there were no others
before him, but because he did have such a specific and orderly atti-
tude toward lighting and he set up that most important thing: an attitude
which demands that there must he a technique and a method for
organizing your ideas.

 By the spring of 1931, when I left Yale for New York, the Depression
had settled like a pall over all our lives. To get a job in the theatre at
any time is "impossible" -- and at that time it was very impossible.

Controlled light is something more than
a medium to promote visibility. It affects
the appearance of all the elements of the
stage and by this power becomes a de-
termining element in the composition of
a stage picture.
          -- Stanley McCandless

While I don't think Jeannie was totally
responsible, she was certainly largely re-
sponsible for bringing organization and
order into the lighting of shows. It used
to be a howling match, with yells and
screams between the front and the back
of the house. After you lit a show, you
knew that you could get back fifty per
cent maximum of the cues you had in-
stituted. By the time I came back from
Hollywood to work in the theatre again,
things had been changed. The whole
system of writing cues -- the whole or-
ganization of lights into patterns, was
such that you could get exactly what
you asked for. That is now true of every-
body--Jean's system of organization
had been adopted by all her disciples
and imitators and by the whole lighting
business.
             -John Houseman

I had the great good fortune to be economically secure: I could live at
home and fail to worry about my next meal while job hunting. Believe
me, that was the difference between staying in the theatre or not in
those days.
Actually I never did "get a job." I made friends, friends who are still
part of my life, among them Martha Graham, with whom I had con-
inued to work -- as a privilege -- in the summers, and John Houseman,
Whom I met through friends of my mother. It was Houseman who
managed to give me the particular encouragement I needed.
I tied in with a group active in the nonpaying theatre. Then, when
the Federal Theatre Project under the WPA (the New Deal's Works
Progress Administration) began to employ some of the unemployed in
this field, which was nearly everybody, I went onto the One Act Project
and began to work very hard.
 What extraordinary good fortune to arrive on the scene just at a time
when we had the FederalTheatre! I was given opportunities at twenty-
one that normally would he extended only if one were at least forty.
As technician in charge of the wagon theatres playing in the city parks,
I had the strenuous experience of moving shows from place to place
each night, setting them up, watching audiences gather on hillsides,
ending the performances, taking the shows down again, and moving
on.... I could scarcely have been given a more thorough education in
the technical problems of touring and making do, all the more valuable
because there was no time to be artistic about art.
 Then John Houseman was made producer for the leading project
under the Federal Theatre: number 891 (which gives you an idea how
we had proliferated). He asked for me as a technical assistant, a sort of
backstage dog's body.
 Orson Welles was 891's director; Abe Feder was in charge of light-
ing, Nat Carson of design. We had Joe Cotten, Arlene Francis, Bil
Baird, Hiram Sherman, Whitford Kane -- at least a dozen such talented
actors -- in the company and Orson was beginning to emerge as a one-
man force in the theatre with his own style and special visualization of
a dramatic production.
 Horse Eats Hat, a high-style farce, was an immediate success in the
depressed city. Tickets were so scarce that scalpers hawked them at a
premium, which ran the prices up in spite of the federal regulations
which made our top ticket eighty-nine cents. (You could sit in the
gallery for twenty-three.) We were housed at the Maxine Elliott, a
Nineteenth-century theatre seating approximately nine hundred. It had
the horseshoe shape which promotes intimacy whatever the size, and
two high balconies. Even on our salaries of $23.86 a week (no matter
what you did) it was satisfying to be with a smash hit.

 When John Houseman took a leave of absence from the Federal
Theatre to produce Leslie Howard's Hamlet he asked me to go along as
assistant stage manager in charge of light cues. In those days you sat
next to the switchboard with the electrician and relayed cues to him

That child, Jean Rosenthal, was a genius
as an executive! It was a period of ex-
ploration and all of us had to "ex-
press ourselves" in order to fight the
humiliation of living under the depres-
sion, the indignities of unemployment.
... At the Federal Theatre, Jean not only
could go into the "chicken coop with-
out disturbing the chickens" as she said
she learned to do at progressive school,
but she insisted on going into the
chicken coop in the first place... and
she was busy discovering how to distrib-
ute light against a background, darken
certain areas, make things come from
longer distances, grow in height...all
taken for granted now.
-- Wendell K. Phillips

 from the head stage manager. Leslie Howard's stage manager, Eddie
 McHugh, had been John Barrymore's stage manager and was an ele-
 gant and wonderful man. I remain in his debt. He agreed to take me on.
  One of those moments of crisis which make or break theatrical
 careers occurred when the man who was to install the lighting system
 -- from Century, think, or Duwico -- was felled. John Houseman
 remembers a burst appendix; I think a ladder collapsed and he broke
 something. Whichever, we had no time to waste on any private drama
 in the drama of opening a show. Instantly I became electrical tech-
 nical director of Hamlet as well as second assistant stage manager,
 duties and titles which I kept throughout the New York run and on tour
 across the United States.
  On the road I recall stretches of forty-eight hours with only one of
 sleep for the technical director (me) and I remember opening in Boston
 without the cue sheets for the second assistant stage manager (me) and
  remember how kind the Howards were to me during the whole
 arduous experience.
    I loved the company, although like all the rest of us supporting the
 performers in the theatre I maintained a faint condescension toward
 the acting profession. At that time I wanted to write plays, design
 whole productions, and probably to direct. As my ambitions dwindled
 to what I do best, I have been able to design and mount a number of
 productions, as well as light them.
  When the tour ended I had saved thirty-five dollars in cash and
 returned to New York, where I was reinstated with Federal Theatre.

  I realize that no one can ever tell the story of the historic opening of
 The Cradle Will Rock as well as the author and composer of the play,
 Marc Blitstein, did. His version was reprinted in the New York Times
 as a supplement to his obituary when he died in 1964. That opening
 was a dramatic highlight in his long, distinguished career.
  All our memories of that opening differ somewhat. Wendell Phillips
 thinks the famous conference took place in the men's room, not the
 ladies' room, of the Maxine Elliott, but concedes that it could have been
 in either one, since the peculiar odor -- clue to memory -- of theatre
 facilities is universal. John Houseman credits me with "charming the
 firemen" into moving a piano into the Venice Theatre. I do not remem-
 ber this, but I have never forgotten the sights and sounds and scents of
 the garment district of New York City as I rode round and round it on
 that truck, waiting for Orson majestically to solve everything.
  At any rate, Marc has the best right to speak and here is his record of
 that drama of censorship, emotion and derring-do in 1936:

 I wrote both the words and the music of The Cradle Will Rock at white heat
during five weeks in 1936. Its first paid public performance at the Venice The-
atre in June, 1937, provided one of the most curious and, I am informed, spec-
tacular evenings in the history of the American theatre.
 It isn't often that the openrng of a Play in New York is the touch-off for a
front page spread in all the next day's papers. The story of The Cradle's open-

             Wednesday [1936]
 Dearest Ma,
 Howard is a lamb ... but I do think
the Englishman as a business man is a
riot -- he just doesn't know what it's all
about.....Mrs. Howard gave me a beau-
tiful compact with a funny little Renoir
reproduction on the front of it--she
said she thought it looked like me....
 Actors are such children -- you're put
to touch them with sense and kindness
and they respond so eagerly they break
your heart....
 I'd like a chance to put some of this
knowledge to the test of reality--I
don't know if can do it with John
Houseman, but there are some things
that may give me a real chance -- to fall
on my face or even maybe not... and
know deep in my heart that eventually
I will get what I am after....
                    J.R.

 ing has taken on a somewhat legendary gloss and blur over the years. There are
 many embellished and apocryphal versions of it. I'm going to try to tell it now
 as I remember it -- the things I know to be facts and the things that others
 present told me.
  When I played The Cradle Will Rock for Orson Welles, he was just twenty-
 one, but already an extravagantly brilliant and magnetic theatre man. He fell in
 love with it straight off and made me promise that no matter who should pro-
 duce it he would do the staging, and I was glad to agree.

  Many producers then toyed with the notion of putting it on. All of them
 dropped it. It was considered "hot stuff" politically, since it dealt with the ris-
 ing struggle for unionism in America -- specifically in the steel industry, at a
 time when the combine known as "Little Steel" was all over the newspapers
 with its union problems.
  Finally Welles and John Houseman decided to produce the work at the
 Maxine Elliott Theatre under the auspices of the Federal Theatre Project, which
 they had joined. That organization was government-subsidized during the De-
 pression days, and everyone, from the charwoman who swept the theatre floor
 to the most ambitious producer, earned the same, $20.00 a week.
  It is not very fashionable these days to refer admiringly to the Federal Theatre
 Project, and yet it was responsible for a great number of today's writers, stars,
 directors and stage designers. We had unlimited time to prepare the produc-
 tion, and we had really quite extraordinary talents in every department at our
 disposal. Rehearsals moved toward a state of perfection rarely attained in any
 present-day theatre.
  But as our opening date began to loom, rumors became rife that The Cradle
 might not be permitted to "rock" publicly at all. One reason given was the
 unionism subject matter. Another was my secondary theme of liberal prostitu-
 tion, personified by "the moll," set against the background of prostitution of
 another kind -- the sellout of one's profession, one's talents, one's dignity and
 integrity, at the hands of big business or the powers that be.
  At any rate, on the chance that we might never really open, Welles and
 Houseman invited to our final dress rehearsal the most elite New York audi-
 ence imaginable. That rehearsal was the first and the last time the work has
 ever been fully performed exactly as I wrote it. It seemed a success.
  The next day we waited with some impatience for the traditional telegram
 from Washington authorizing us to go ahead with our premiere. It was not
 forthcoming. Instead, the Military appeared. The box-office personnel were
 instructed to turn away ticket buyers and the sets and costumes were placed
 out of reach. And now the irrepressible energy and lightning drive of Orson
 Welles revealed themselves.
  He called us all -- the entire production complement of cast, stage man-
 agers, musicians and stagehands -- together in the only theatre green room we
 had. It was actually the ladies' powder room downstairs. I remember an unex-
 plained pink velvet mannequin standing in one corner.
  Welles said to us, "We have a production ready; we have a fully paid audi-
 ence outside." (It was there, many people had come early, in the afternoon,
 and were standing in front of the theatre. They had heard the rumors and they
 scented excitement.)
 "And," said Welles, "we will have our premiere tonight."

 But how and where! The first thing was to find a theatre, but in the mean-
time there were a dozen other jobs to do. What about the contractual situa-
tion of the actors, of the musicians! Could they leave this theatre and perform
the work elsewhere! A telephone call to Actors' Equity Union produced the in-
formation -- which turned out to be false -- that the actors could not perform
Cradle on any other stage under different auspices without losing their status
in the project.

  Then we were told by the Musicians' Local that moving our orchestra to an-
 other theatre pit would set us in competition with regular Broadway musicals
 and that not only would the men have to be paid Broadway salaries, but we
 would have to increase the number of musicians instead of reducing it. How-
 ever, said this informant, if we called ourselves a concert and put our musicians
 onstage, then we could use as many or as few as we could afford.
  So there we were in the position of having a production without a theatre,
 actors who could not appear onstage and musicians who could appear nowhere
 else -- enough to make the stoutest enthusiast admit defeat and give up, but
 Welles proceeded to solve problems with an ingenuity, a speed and a daring
 can almost not believe as tell it. To the actors he said, "You may not appear
 onstage, but there is nothing to prevent you from buying your way into what-
 ever theatre we find, and then why not get up from your seats, as first-class
 American citizens, and speak your piece when your cue comes."
  About the music, Welles, consulting Houseman, decided we could afford
 only one musician, which would be myself at a piano onstage. had played
 and sung the work so often for prospective producers (we used to call it my
 Essex House run) and had done so many rehearsals with our actors that felt
 quite confident and nothing loath. At once we all began to catch fire.
  The ladies' powder room of the Maxine Elliott Theatre became a beehive of
 activity, an arsenal of planning. Newspaper agencies, reporters and photogra-
 phers were summoned with the word that something was up. By this time it
 was six o'clock in the evening. A large crowd had gathered in front of the
 house, undaunted by Military or box-office pronouncements of "No Show To-
 night." Welles wanted to keep them there, so he sent out two of our actors to
 sing songs from The Cradle and entertain them until we could tell them where
 to go to see the production. And still no theatre.

  It was summertime and most empty theatres were in mothballs and would
 probably not contain a piano anyway. Houseman dispatched little Jean Rosen-
 thal, our production manager, then a pint-sized child just out of college. With
 a ten-dollar bill in her hand, she was to board and commandeer the first avail-
 able truck on the street and circle with it around the block while we tried to
 locate a rentable piano. We found one by phone. Yes, the landlady down-
 stairs said, we could borrow her piano. So Jeannie was shouted the address (for
 once out of the theatre, you didn't get back in) with instructions to wait, piano
 in her pocket, until phoned where to deliver it.
 We were by now collectively tearing our hair with frustration at the lack of
a theatre. And then a little man who had been with us for quite some time
sighed and said, "You'll have to take my house, I guess." It was the Venice
Theatre, later called the New Century, some twenty blocks away up on Fifty-
eighth Street and Seventh Avenue.
 Jeannie was phoned and promptly brought an old upright piano to a sleepy
caretaker who woke up on cue and managed to get four stalwart neighboring
firemen to help lift the instrument onto the new stage. The theatre's address
was then announced to the audience outside the Maxine Elliott. And now
commenced a parade up Broadway and Seventh Avenue to Fifty-eighth Street,
with taxis containing Welles, Houseman, Abe Feder, myself and reporters, all
followed by an entire audience on foot, marching to see a show. By the time
we reached the Venice our original audience of less than a thousand had
doubled as the word spread.
 Lehman Engel, our conductor, had rushed home, got his winter overcoat,
and returned to smuggle my orchestra score out of one theatre into another.
Onstage at the Venice, with the curtains closed, we pulled the front off the
Piano so that its guts showed, since in so large a house we needed a consider-
able volume of tone, and Feder arranged a spotlight for it. I could hear an
enormous buzz of talk in the theatre and when the curtains opened and I
looked, I saw the place was jammed to the rafters. The side aisles were lined
with cameramen and reporters. And there was I, alone on a bare stage, perched
before the naked piano in my shirtsleeves, it being a hot night. There onstage,
I couldn't know which or how many of our actors had elected to take Welles'
suggestion or where they were in the audience, but I started, ready to do the
whole show myself.
 I began singing the "moll's" first song of the play and then I heard the words
taken from my mouth by the "moll" herself, seated in a right loge, and clever
Feder promptly switched the spot to her. Well, she's here anyway, I thought
thankfully. Then occurred a dialogue between the "moll" and a character
called "The Gent." Again I heard an actor take my melody and my lines from
me, only this time from mid-center in the orchestra.
 Flashbulbs began to pop. The audience seethed with excitement. As the
play progressed, they turned as at a tennis match, from one actor to another,
while Feder caught as many performers as he could with his spotlight and
musical conversations took place across the house. The cast had studied the
words so thoroughly they could have done it in their sleep, and this was much
simpler.
 I did about eight parts myself that night. Some of the actors had not wished
to take their lives, or rather their living wage, into their hands.
 But at one point we all heard an accordion out front joining my piano in
the title song. The accordionist from my orchestra had dared to come and
bring his instrument.
 Not a hitch occurred in the continuity and some wonderful accidents of
geography turned up. For example, "Mrs. Mister" was seen handing an im-
aginary donation from a balcony front box to the "Reverend Salvation" down-
stairs in mid-aisle. And the play itself held up astonishingly well under this
brutal and unpredictable manhandling. At the end of the first act, the poet
Archibald MacLeish sprinted backstage to say "a new day had dawned in the
theatre, the stagnant and supine audience had been killed forever" and he had
to make a speech about it. And so he did, after the final curtain.
 Even that moment had its particular theatrical flair. MacLeish wore a Palm
Beach suit, and when Welles held up his hand and finally stopped the roaring
pandemonium that greeted us, saying, "We will all now sit down, and the one
man left standing will be Mr. Archibald MacLeish," there stood the white suit
gleaming conspicuously, as we were told we had witnessed a historical event.
  Later, critics would give The Cradle Will Rock rave reviews and there
would be about twenty-five other productions of it in the United States
and England. Immediately following that first opening at the Venice,
Welles and Houseman were fired from the Federal Theatre. In fact we
all got fired.
 After some hesitation Orson and John founded the Mercury Theatre;
they rented the lovely old Comedie, which was a shambles, changed its
name to the Mercury and went into production. They were financed to
the tune of six thousand dollars by a man who was a connoisseur of
Chinese art and who disapproved of censorship.
 I was offered the job as the Mercury Theatre's technical director at
the Actors' Equity minimum, which was then forty dollars a week for
seniors (by then including me) and twenty-five dollars for juniors.
Whether Abe Feder, who had been Project 891's lighting expert, turned
the job down or whether Orson did not want him I do not know. Abe,
a fanatic about light who talked a streak, went on to become one of the
innovators in the lighting design business and a consultant on the light-
ing of many major buildings and projects as well as working in the
theatre. Abe was gadget-happy and opinionated and I recall Orson
bellowing at him once to know why a particular and conspicuous light
had suddenly appeared on that scene. Abe replied with great heat that
it was a NEW one, with a gelatin that he had NEVER TRIED BEFORE.
Anyway, I was privileged to move on with those two large, brilliant,
independent men, John Houseman and Orson Welles, and to take part
in the Mercury experience. They also brought along the actors in whom
they had the greatest interest.
 The Mercury Theatre's importance was that it represented a group of
people who already had a considerable working experience together,
involved in real repertory theatre. For all of us, working under the
dominant direction of Orson Welles was clear-cut, stimulating and
rewarding.
 John Houseman, Sam Leve, the scene designer, and I met with Orson
to discuss the first production. This was to be Shakespeare's Julius
Caesar, designed to emphasize its contemporary parallels. Orson dic-
tated clearly and exactly the kind of look he wanted the production to
have, a very simple look, based on the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg. The
patterns implied in the Nuremberg "festivals" were in terms of plat-
forms, which were the basis of the scenery, and lights which went up
or down. The up light was really taken entirely from the effect the
Nazis achieved.
 One effect, spoken of as stunning and inventive, was a marvelous
accident. During a dress rehearsal someone forgot to turn out the bald,
overhead work lights -- whose sole purpose is to illuminate the grid
from which the scenery ropes and pulleys are suspended -- and they
continued to shine down during the blackout just before the orchard
scene. The pattern, crisscrossing the stage, conveyed an impression of
ground beneath hare branches. Paradoxically in view of the hard think-
ing and planning I believe in, accident is often the source of inspira-
tion. Magpie, I use anything that comes along, and I immediately in-
corporated those work lights in the light plot.
 The Caesar opened with tremendous eclat. Houseman explained,
exactly how I have forgotten, that despite the incidental courtesies of
the profession, it was important that Orson be given sole credit for
everything. However, it did get around in the profession that Sam had
designed the scenery and that I had done the lighting.
 For the second production, Shoemaker's Holiday, our platforms
flipped around with houses on them to simulate a funny little medieval
town, and it was as open and friendly a show and as raucous a comedy
as the Caesar was contemporary in parallel and serious in intent. The
two shows played perfectly together and were enormously successful.
 Heartbreak House, with Orson as Captain Shotover, was good, too, I
think, but somehow managed to have very little life. It closed when
the summer doldrums set in. Then everybody went into a great state
of eruption and change of plan.

I want to take the Light out of the Bottle
and put it everywhere.... I have no
patience with wires or fuse boxes and
bulbs.... There is more light in [my]
Prometheus Fountain than in a dozen
fountains in Rome or Paris.
                -- Abe Feder

The wonderful days of the Mercury! We
were so poor, we had absolutely no
money at all, and the whole business of
cutting corners and doing things that
were not doable.... Orson poured his
radio earnings into it.... Jeannie even
inveigled some wonderful night watch-
man into feeding us heat from a bank
across the street when we couldn't pay
our heating bills. With four hits in a
row, we were very successful, but we
were always and constantly and per-
petually broke.
             -- John Houseman

 The following season was taken up with Five Kings, which was the
way, Orson decided, to present Shakespeare's Histories. He put to-
gether all of Henry IV and Henry V, with an introduction from Richard
111 and a codicil from Henry VI, and once again was startlingly lucid
about what he wanted and how it should look. Jimmy Morcom was
the designer, and all of us on the production staff had a fine time work-
ing it out, but no excitement ever reached the audience, even through
the stars who supplemented the company, like Burgess Meredith as
Prince Hal. That really marvelous production was boring -- catastrophic
from an audience point of view, appalling, really -- in spite of extraor-
dinary moments. Its out-of-town tour, cosponsored by the Theatre
Guild, was disastrous and it never came hack in to New York. At least I
learned a great deal about touring heavy shows and about getting along
with other managements.
 A wild summer interlude was provided by Too Much Johnson, a play
Orson decided to do half film and half live. The film for it, a farcical
piece of exposition, shot in Washington chicken markets and along the
banks of the Hudson River palisades, was riotously funny, one of the
funniest films I ever saw. It may still be sitting in the lab since nobody
had the money to get it out, and the play had to go on without the
film. The people who saw the play were pretty confused, hut it was
summer theatre, which was flopping anyhow, and nobody really cared.
 After that, Houseman and Welles went off to Hollywood, where the
lighting was all done by the cameramen. My extraordinary employ-
ment, in which I had learned to swim by being dumped in deep water,
was suspended. They came back in 1941 and produced Native Son,
which was, I think, one of the great productions of the American thea-
tre. Once again Orson was very clear about how it should look and
with Paul Green, the author, very clear about what it should say. It had
no ending, which was disturbing, and Orson hired a leading player
who was not an actor but a boxer, which made for complications, but
still it ranks very high indeed as a successful statement in terms of
Orson's system of visualizing an environment.
 I think the Mercury Theatre made so much sense to me and I was so
sorry when it broke up because it was an organization, which is neces-
sary for repertory. I function best in this area. The orderly use of
rehearsal and performance time, the limitations repertory imposes,
have an unhurried tension, a design, which makes every moment count.
No time is wasted in having hysterics. You can only work if you plan
your work, thinking it out in advance. And I like the order imposed
because every night is an opening night and no night is really a failure.

 I still worked for Martha Graham, and I began an association with
Lincoln Kirstein and his Ballet Society which was to last eighteen years,
but this was during the days when devotees of the dance were not very
numerous. (Ballet still does not pay, but it does sell out.) Keeping body
and soul together while remaining in the theatre became one of my
favorite investigations.

Jeannie was fantastic. She went through
all the agony of Five Kings, installing a
huge revolving stage without enough
money to buy the motor to drive it....
She was not only very good at lighting
and an extremely able technical expert,
but she kept up the morale when too
much was being asked of human beings,
particularly of the electricians. Jean kept
up their spirits, kept the whole thing
going. We could not have survived at
the Mercury without the particular corn-
bination of talents she brought to us.
-- John Houseman

 The theatre was a tough place in which to get started or to earn a
living in when you had. In 1940, while still sporadically engaged with
Orson Welles as well as with ballet, I opened a little firm called
Theatre Production Service. It was a mail-order house for theatrical
supplies, a market already competed for by Cleon Throckmorton and
Scrim Plywood. I offered a complete design service, for shows and for
theatres, so that I could plan my customers' needs as well as supply
them. Joining me in the enterprise were two able, talented women
graduates of the Yale Drama Workshop, Helen Marcy and Eleanor Wise.
 Our offices were two rooms over the lovely old Empire Theatre at
Fortieth and Broadway. From the first the TPS catalogue, if I do say so
myself, was a masterpiece of clarity and practicality and we did pretty
well until the nation went to war. After that you could not get mate-
rials for much of anything without government priorities. Helen went
to work days for Eaves Costume Company as a stock clerk and I took a
job nights drafting in a shipyard. Eleanor (Ellie) manned the office
full time.
 When the old Mercury's John Houseman and George Coulouris
drifted back east from Hollywood, I had a flurry of work as a pro-
ducer, in technical charge of Richard III and other shows. TPS handled
all the contracts, supplied the physical properties and all that. But still,
in order to stay alive and continue to pay the rent we had to do business
with the government.
 Our contract to put together special service recreation kits for the
army was, like many war efforts, as supremely wasteful to the taxpayer
as it was necessary to us. The kit was designed by an ignoramus and
made up of a very specific assortment of doubtful items: a certain
number of yards of theatre muslin, a certain number of rolls of crepe
paper, so many pounds of clout nails, so many packages of Pit or Tinter
fabric dyes, so many cans of latex paste...This collection had to be
exquisitely packed according to government specifications so that the
kits could be pushed off boats and floated ashore in the Pacific. On
weekends we hired flocks of high school kids to assemble these items,
wrap them in waterproof liners and seal them with wax. We rented
two rooms in a building next door to the Empire, half a floor down,
with a pass door between so that we could all wiggle our way through.
 There was no profit per se. Government money took three months
to arrive. During the interval you had to resort to usurers, who knew
you had to have the money in order to operate and also that you would
get the money in the end. It was all nicely calculated to keep you broke
and afloat. But there was legitimate profit for us in the inefficient plan-
ning. Muslin, for instance, came in bolts. After cutting each bolt to
the Army's immutable orders, we had one hundred yards left over for
our own use.
 On government waste we survived and even hired another staff
member, Nan Percher. She was to run the "grocery business" end of
TPS and we made her swear to have NOTHINC TO DO WITH THE THEATRE.
On her first rush delivery job, at Lewisohn Stadium, she was hauled in
the stage door to serve as emergency assistant stage manager that
night. Later she became my invaluable stage manager for ballet and
opera.
Over the years TPS has never made much, but it has involved a great
many other people and really kept me alive, interested and active in a
curious profession where people tend to rot six months of the year.
Also it has provided me, through the years, with a much-needed sense
of organized professional continuity.

 My professional home was always "on Broadway," although for most
of my career I have been associated with the special kind of theatre
that only periodically invades Broadway -- lyric rather than commer-
cial theatre. I was on Broadway from the beginning because the the-
atres were there, physically. The Mercury succeeded on Broadway, all
the way through Native Son, which was squarely on Forty-fourth Street
in what was then the St. James Theatre. The Ballet Society became the
New York City Ballet at the City Center on Fifty-fifth Street, well within
the area included under "Broadway." Gian Carlo Menotti's engaging
little operas opened on Broadway. Martha Graham's breakthrough into
popular recognition and success happened one night at the Martin
Beck Theatre on Forty-fifth Street. TPS, although its business was mail-
order, moved from the Empire Theatre only as far as West Forty-sixth
Street. (In 1969 it was forced downtown by high rents and the need for
more space to East Ninth Street.) In 1957 1 did begin to concentrate on
the classic sort of show identified with Broadway, including three mu-
sicals that year, one of which was West Side Story. Broadway is an idea,
a domain and an enterprise, with its own identity within which I had
an identity. During the decade 1958-1968 the development of an ex-
tremely active off-Broadway theatre and an extremely active regional
theatre has compounded the theatrical scene, but Broadway still repre-
sents the standard by which excellence in the theatre is judged. And
that is where I was and am.
 From Broadway, I have traveled on tour all over this great country
and its major cities, around Europe and its great cities. I also know
Broadway's tryout towns well, the museums and restaurants, hotels and
haunts, as well as the theatres of Philadelphia, Boston, and New Haven
and half a dozen others.
 For five years, between 1953 and 1957, 1 spent a great deal of time in
nearby Stratford, Connecticut, in technical charge of the Shakespeare
Festivals, until John Houseman left as director, and I left.
 A second career, as a consultant on lighting systems for theatre build-
ings and other buildings where offbeat lighting was called for took me
farther afield psychologically than did touring -- whether I was work-
in on the Los Angeles Music Center, Canada's national theatres, the
Pan American building at Kennedy Airport, or the Juilliard School of
Music and Drama at Lincoln Center.
 Fortunately I can work anywhere -- and do -- out of a briefcase de-
signed to carry tightly rolled plans, layouts, architect's drawings, blue-

I tried to get the Graham management
to cut down on paper -- the free tickets
they gave out to fill the house -- for that
recital. I can't tell you why--the ad-
vance sale was light. But something was
in the air. And that night, the hordes
came. No audience is so ruthless as
those who have decided to see a dance
recital. They fought each other like
tigers to get at the box-office window
when the last seats began to go. After
the "Standing Room Only" and then the
SOLD OUT signs went up, we had to
call the mounted cops to clear the lobby
and the street.
-- Dora Chamberlain

prints. I can create an office with invisible walls in a plane seat (I do
travel first class, for elbow room), in airport alcoves, in hotel rooms, in
any corner of any theatre. My mind is a bit like a camera, its inward eye
registering a series of constant visual images. Now and then I stop
when one is right and print it, to file. From thesefriles, I can always
recall a print. Words to me are I i ke captions for these images.
 It is not easy to communicate about light, in captions to pictures you
cannot make anyone else see quite the way you do. On Broadway, a
common vocabulary has been adopted -- terms such as quality of
light, pattern, color washes, downlight and hacklight convey accepted
meanings. When I leave the island of Manhattan and the inner island
that is Broadway, it becomes harder to communicate. Perhaps that is
the reason I am there and that I have a sense that being in Manhattan
is restful.
  I live there, too, downtown on the East Side. I never moved far. My
succession of apartments have been on East Seventeenth Street, on Irv-
ing Place, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth, and on Twenty-sixth
Street, east of Park Avenue. Sometimes I have lived alone and some--
times shared my apartment. Of necessity I learned to cook and then to
love cooking as domestic recreation and an art.

 The need to be close to nature came very late to me, child of city
streets and woman of the metropolitan theatre. When it came, it hit
me hard. Because I loved the sea, I thought of its shores and somehow,
quite naturally, landed on another island to make a second home.
Once I settled on Martha's Vineyard, it seemed as much mine as
Manhattan is.
 I love Martha's Vineyard and insist, as all its dwellers do, that its air
is the softest and its light the most delicate in the world. I walk the
island's undulating roads and through the low-growing woods and on
the sand or pebble beaches with the pride of ownership. New York,
like London and Paris, is a walkers' city, which most other cities are not,
so my legs (not my best feature, by the way -- they are stubby) were
used to walking, but I had forgotten the pleasure of breathing deep
with each step.
 To get to Martha's Vineyard one must make the utmost effort -- fly
by small, weather-sensitive planes or end up a trek by car or bus with
an hour's ride across to the island on those small, inelegant ferries. But
it is worth the effort, even for the shortest intervals. I have even redis-
covered dawn, which I had not seen in years except for occasions when
I had been up all night.
 For the first time, on the \/ineyard, I have had the time -- for time
seems to stretch itself as I do, within its cradle of seas -- to consider
and sum up my lifetime in light.

I became very fond of those rather fat
little legs. (Jean could stand on a stage
fourteen hours a day.) They had great
charm. They weren't fat, they were
sturdy.
               -- Oliver Smith